Oscars Data Forecast: 'Jackie' Is Front-Runner for Best Picture Win, Analytics Startup Predicts

Can the language used in movie reviews hold the tea leaves revealing the winners of the Academy Awards? That's the hypothesis of Luminoso Technologies, an artificial-intelligence startup that specializes in natural-language processing, which has already declared the likely best-picture winner of the 2017 Academy Awards before the nominations are even out: Pablo Larraín's biopic "Jackie," starring Natalie Portman as Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Here's the methodology: The company analyzed user movie reviews for 2013-15 in IMDb, focusing on the 50 most popular movies of each year, to see if there was a correlation behind the concepts that appeared in their language and the eventual Oscar nominees that year. Luminoso's software found certain specific concepts -- such as "cinematography," "masterpiece," "stunning," "visuals" and "experience" -- were highly correlated with films that received nominations. Concepts like "narrative" had less correlation with Oscar nods, and a few (like "CGI" and "horror") had negative correlation.